1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to computer network environments. More specifically, the present invention relates to accessing the content of a web page when a visual display is not available.
2. Description of Related Art
Information on the World Wide Web is typically made available by structuring the information into a visual presentation. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is used by the web author to define the visual structure. The end user is presented with this information by viewing the information on a computer display, after the information has been rendered into a visual format by a web browser (e.g. Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer).
However, the visual presentation of web pages is not accessible by people with vision impairments, nor is the content accessible by users who do not have a visual display device available. A variety of software products are becoming available which enable non-visual access to the HTML pages. These products capture the web page content and then present an audible rendering of the web page. This is generally accomplished by using a text-to-speech (TTS) technology to read the textual content.
In a non-visual web browser, the current position of the TTS “cursor” in the document is called the Point of Regard (POR). In the absence of visual queues, however, it is often difficult for a user of an audible web browser to determine where the POR is within the current web page. For example, a sighted user viewing a web page might page down through a few screens and see that he is in the second paragraph following a header. The user can also use the visual position of a scroll bar to assess the position relative to the entire page. The visually impaired user (or a sighted user without a visual display), by contrast, may have arrived at the same point in the document after pressing the Scroll Down key several times, but he will have no idea what section he is in. It is easy for such a user to get lost within the document after he has been navigating within it for some time. The visually impaired user might lose track of his overall position within a document (top, middle or bottom), as well as what specific section of the document he is currently accessing. The user might also have problems determining what other content is surrounding the specific content being directly accessed.
Prior art in this area involves counting up every item in the web page and announcing the POR as an index within the total number of items on the page. For example, “Item 54 of 206 items”. The running time for this approach is proportional to the number of items on the web page. In addition, the prior art does not provide specific description of the page contents.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a method for audible description of a user's position in a web page that provides detail concerning web page contents and reduces processing time.